William Daley weighs in on Congress fix, bin Laden gamble

William Daley talks about White House tenure

Kristoffer Tripplaar

President Barack Obama announces the resignation of White House Chief of Staff William Daley, right, in Washington, D.C, on Monday, January 9, 2012. Daley spoke Wednesday to the Union League Club of Chicago.

President Barack Obama announces the resignation of White House Chief of Staff William Daley, right, in Washington, D.C, on Monday, January 9, 2012. Daley spoke Wednesday to the Union League Club of Chicago. (Kristoffer Tripplaar)

Rick PearsonClout Street

Former White House chief of staff William Daley today offered his prescription for fixing a politically polarized Washington: imposing congressional term limits, doubling House terms to four years and ending archaic Senate rules.

The brother of former Mayor Richard Daley also said a post-election, lame-duck Congress should delay the January implementation of massive budget cuts and extend the Bush-era tax cuts until September 2013. That would allow lawmakers to digest voter sentiment and achieve the “big deal” on deficit reduction that eluded them this year.

Speaking at a public affairs breakfast at the Union League Club, Daley also said the Supreme Court decision that allowed so-called super political action committees to influence elections could be the “game changer” preventing President Barack Obama’s re-election.

Providing a sometimes intimate, sometimes humorous reflection on his year as Obama’s chief of staff, Daley also warned that “the nastiness, the meanness, the sort of crassness, coarseness” that has invaded politics is the result of a lack of civility in society as a whole.

“How uncivil are we to each other as a society,” said Daley, whose tenure ended in January. “Politics, yes, should be better. Each institution should be better. But why should we think that they’re somehow immune from maybe our broader society?”

Daley said the influence of the Internet and social media has created the biggest difference in Washington since his previous stint as commerce secretary during the Clinton administration.

The constant flow of information, some of it factual and some agenda-driven and erroneous, isn’t helping, he said.

“We have a very serious challenge ahead of us in this new world we’re in of how you govern, of how you are deliberative, how the process can deal with major issues and deliberate and talk it through and debate it in a serious way over time when we’re now moving to a society that’s all about instantaneous action,” he said.

Daley said he supports several congressional reforms, calling the current two-year term of House members outmoded because it places a premium on election fundraising instead of governing. “I think the two-year term ought to be extended to four years. People ought to actually do something before they run again and be held responsible,” he said.

Representatives and senators should be term limited, Daley said, though he did not offer a specific number. He also cited the rule that 60 votes are needed to end a filibuster that blocks legislation as among several Senate changes needed to allow majority control.

“If we don’t begin to do some serious major things and changes here, then we’re just going to continue to kind of wallow,” Daley said. “People in the system are getting sick and tired of this stuff in Washington and the public surely is.”

Obama named Daley chief of staff in part to try to bridge the Democratic administration with Republicans who took control of the House. Daley said a massive plan to cut the nation’s debt and deficits with Republican House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio was close at hand until tea party forces in the GOP majority opposed tax-hike provisions.

With an automatic $109 billion in domestic and defense budget cuts scheduled to take place on Jan. 2, Daley said it would be a “terrible mistake” if people think that a major deficit cutting plan could be agreed upon in a short period after the November election. He said regardless of the outcome on Nov. 6, “this idea of a mandate, I don’t think, happens for anybody.”

“The best thing that could happen would be for everybody to kind of take a deep breath, so OK we’re going to kinda kick the can for nine months… (and) we can do a big entitlement reduction in spending and come up with a balanced government game plan with tax reform at the heart of it,” he said.

Speaking later to reporters, Daley said Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney’s efforts to court voters by vowing to bring a business CEO’s experience to the White House is “not the way our congressional-presidential-executive relationship exists” in government.

“This idea that somehow the CEO is going to come in and take control,” Daley said. “It’s not real.”

Recalling a year at the White House that included the assassination attempt on then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., the earthquake and tsunami in Japan and the “Arab Spring” uprisings on Middle East governments, Daley said the U.S. military expedition that killed terrorist leader Osama bin Laden was the “biggest moment of my life in a professional sense.”

Despite months of meetings and intelligence gathering, Daley told reporters Obama’s decision to move forward with the raid on a Pakistan compound almost a year ago was “rolling the dice on the presidency” because of the potential for failure.

“If you went to 26th and California (home of the Cook County criminal courts) with the evidence that Osama bin Laden was in that building, there’s no judge that would have given you a search warrant,” Daley told the audience.